Edited by Gilbert Adair

Definition of basics

Nick Montfort with the code for his "PPG-256-1 (Perl Poetry Generator in 256 characters)."

Cayley: Although not writing in ignorance of the questions that have been addressed to us and some of the responses, forgive me if, for a further contribution, I continue with a second part to the prose I began in my last posting, while nonetheless using Gilbert’s “Do you find that words are sufficient … ?” as a particular stimulus. In some sense, after all, I’m here to represent writing [in/of/for] digital[/other] media.

When I wrote, previously, that “language is the medium of poetry,” there might seem to be an implication that words are sufficient. They are. Poetry is, chiefly, aesthetic symbolic practice played out in the specific human-cultural domain of language. Many linguistics will say, with Chao Yuen Ren, that “Language is linear. It is one-dimensional.”[1] Language is, in my own interpretation of this claim, linear at the temporally moving instants of both production and reception. It would be a little more accurate to say that, at these moments, it is two-dimensional, having one of extension and one of time. I agree that this quality is fundamental to language, and that any nonlinearity or extra-dimensionality of syntactic constructs (like this one) is a matter of pre- and post-production and that, more fundamentally, extra dimensions of language are both indeterminate and divorced from any materiality of language that is proper to it, at least in the sense that a linguist (a type of scientist) would acknowledge. However this ‘proper’ materiality of language is purely historical and most linguists would agree with me unreservedly when I wrote that “any relationship between language and media is arbitrary.” I did mean any relation including the culturally (conventionally) recognized association of words with particular significance and affect. The linguist studies an arbitrary, indeterminate but historically inscribed materiality, while bracketing extra-arbitrary, extra-indeterminate dimensions of language that are also conventional (dependent on human discursive agreements) but which are generated at multiple indeterminate and arbitrary points of production and reception. Words are sufficient, but anything can be a word, in any number of dimensions.

There has to be a (back)ground against which the traces of these other dimensions can be remarked. I’m already going deeper than I wanted, and so I will desist from further amateur philosophy (philosophy=science? linguistic philosophy=science?) by asserting that the ground we need consists in those “operations of our subjectivities … typically … deemed to be private or internal.” “The trick of being alive is something about having an outside which can be witnessed, and an inside that can’t.”[2] I do seem to be claiming that science-as-technological-mediation engages with poetry at precisely the point where science-as-affectless-denial-of-an-inside is least capable of bearing witness to any potential blossomings of virtuality and aesthetics.

(Self-)sufficient words generate extra-dimensionalities of language. Moreover, just as ‘mere’ convention establishes particular natural languages as uncontested objects of scientific study, there is an extra sufficiency of habitual literary practice that allows other dimensions of texts to be distinctly appreciable — to criticism, if not to science. Singularly, traditionally, these dimensions remain ‘beyond’ the words themselves, emergent as a function of humanistic interpretation. Such phenomena exist, virtually. New media may, arbitrarily, materialize virtual dimensions of poetic practice, and this is what we have seen taking place — selectively, arbitrarily — since programmable machines became accessible to writers. To take an obvious example: the screen-based temporal presentation of textual events materializes a virtual performativity of graphic writing practices, both remediating and recalling actual performances of orality, and restoring a restructured time-based dimension to language, one that is at least ostensibly or potentially more complex than the apparently resolved or resolvable linearity of print. In general, this restructuring, in language, of the human culture of time is, in my opinion, one of the few recent developments in aesthetic language practices that requires a fundamental rethinking of the object of literary criticism — of those that are enabled by programmable media, that is. More and more (poetic) writing will be, literally, materially, time-based, and it will be inappropriate if not impossible to address many literary objects/processes as established texts, or as texts in a ‘before,’ ‘after,’ or any other state.

But even this vital, inalienable, if until recently ‘stunned,’ dimension of written language was always, I would claim, virtually present and available to all language practice, regardless of media. This is equally true of the familiar varieties of simultaneous relationship between linguistic items, such as those described as metaphoric. They are ever-present effervescent lexical and allusive tori, haloing the syntagmatic flow. Despite and apart from any technological ‘affordances,’ the flow remains capable of generating a bewildering and uncharted variety of significant and affective dimensions. This makes it difficult for any particular technology to gain an established status. For me, recently, one proof of this strange state of affairs has been revealed in the disregard or, perhaps, misdirected regard that writers have for typography as a productive dimension of writing. Typographic sensitivity is taken as evidence for attention to the graphic materiality of language (a problematic concept: is the materiality graphic or linguistic?); whereas I believe that the typographic is an established, but insufficiently acknowledged dimension of linguistic practice, a structured field in which syntagmatic flow has long been seen and felt to exist, and which allows it to generate and elaborate significant and affective relations precisely in a typographic dimension that is oblique to both time and syntactic extension. Further proof that this historically established practice is not sufficiently appreciated is demonstrated by the common practice of ditching established typographic principles as soon as other new technologies become available; I mean technologies that may be seen to serve the relational purposes typography once served, or that highlight other ‘newer’ or more fashionable textual relations. The situation may be improving, but think of the standard unschooled typographic engagement of animated, kinetic textuality — more concerned with concrete poetic figures (language-as-graphics miming animate, kinetic objects) than with poetics per se (assuming poetics represents thinking through aesthetic linguistic practice from a comprehensive and open perspective).

Thus, a recent long-term collaboration, with Daniel C. Howe, still in its initial stages, The Readers Project, is, in some measure, a poetic exploration and visualization of the typographic dimension of selected linguistic practices. However, more importantly for the present discussion, other aspects of this project exemplify certain ways in which programmable media, accessing indexed language on the Internet, enable different modes of engagement with poetic process. It’s conceivable to me that these generative modes can be characterized in terms of what we currently recognize as practices of science.

Procedure is well established as an aspect of innovative poetic practice and in so far as procedure is an externalization and objectification of compositional artifice — the fabrication of poetic automata — it may share the pretended affectlessness of science, although at the risk of literary inconsequence, unless, for example, a demonstrable mastery of arbitrary formal constraint redeems a ludic gesture as high art. Think OuLiPo. But arguably, and arguably only recently, digitally mediated access to language in the sense of an implicitly comprehensive (all of the Net) indexed corpus allows a significant shift in the relationship between procedure and language as such. Rather than seeing procedural poetry as a literalization of the “machine made of words” we might think of certain procedures or processes as poetically, aesthetically inclined instruments for observing and manipulating language, ways of working with the external world of language that allows us to see differently. Here I mean instrument in the sense of scientific instrument, rather than musical; not something you play in order to be able to make or recite a distinct piece of art in performance, but a construction that alters our perception of whatever is presented to us, in this case language, allowing us to perceive and experience what is already there and to know it differently, if not necessarily ‘better.’

Is it the case that one of those things that the indexed Internet allows us to do is to have a sense of an ‘all of language’ in the manner that we have a sense of the all of nature? Those instruments of science that have been developed during and since the enlightenment have only relatively recently given us a generative sense of “all of our (spherical) earth,” orbiting a star, in a galaxy, in an expanding universe, (im)possibly one of innumerable multiverses. Now, although what is visible language — like visible matter — is only a tiny faction of the dark words that must surely be everywhere, nonetheless our perspective has been shifted radically by the existence of the Net and by the instruments at our near-free disposal which index and structure this universe.

And does this now entail our being able to see language as more like nature than we had previously? Perhaps even more at one with nature than we had considered? I mean this not in terms of any spurious human/natural dichotomy, but in terms of what the Chinese have called ziran, the “self-so,” phenomena which simply are what they are, lacking any concern for the human or whatever-might-be-opposed-to-it, for the outside-inside subjective dialectics of any particular living species.

I find myself implicitly making great claims for what, in terms of actual poetic production are still only tiny gestures. I’m appending a few texts made using very simple programs. There is an explicit intention here, inspired in part by Nick Montfort’s more OuLiPian ppg256 project, to keep the engineered artifice of the machine itself as compact and as simple as possible, allowing structures in language itself to be revealed by these instruments, like lenses that simply magnify the images passing through them; always assuming there is present a complementary perceptual system — an eye or a poetic sensibility — to further appreciate the resulting anamorphic retinal impressions.

Or, if I could, I would make a programmatic instrument that was like the naturally articulated granite outcrop of a small lakeland island, where light, breeze-formed waves of language would ebb and flow in chaotically braided coils, through faults and channels in the long-worn rock. Watching and listening to this moving water: Is this science? Or poetry? What is the knowledge or aesthetics that such processes enfold?

breaks the askedwondering in lostwords drifting onlynear her graniteher first selvesreaches out hunganother father expectedmisunderstanding and textsanother father expectedher first selvesbreaks the askedher waist halyard

breaks the askedpulled back entropy

just below tracing

that gives hovershovers over pinerock from lacinguntil he misspelther first selves

Thousands of specially constructed three-word phrases, named in the course of our developing practice digrams, were generated from John Cayley’s prose poem “Misspelt Landings” by combining all of this text’s two-word syntagms with every unique word in the text. (“ — ” was at this point treated as a ‘word.’) These were then searched-for programmatically, double-quoted, in Google Books (shamelessly defying certain “terms of use”*) and the counts were collected. (This was originally done to give a simple ‘skewed-Markov’ statistical ‘intelligence’ to autonomous readers that were being made in the context of a larger project.) All of the three-word digrams that make up the lines of the above poems (poems?) were selected, manually, from amongst zero-count digrams, i.e. those not (yet) found in the Google-indexed ‘corpus.’ The total number of selected, potential zero-count lines was (for this experiment) only two hundred. (Early days.) A simple program, the Zero-Count Stitcher, first picks one of these at random and then iteratively hunts through the remainder for a next line for which the count of {line n, word 2 + word 3 + line n+1, word 1} or {line n, word 3 + line n+1, word 1 + word 2}, searched-for programmatically in Google, is above a certain threshold (3 or 5 in these cases), i.e. the programs hunts for an attested ‘natural language’ enjambment. Numbers in the title are the serial numbers of the Stitcher’s runs. In later runs ‘stanza’ breaks are generated whenever it took the Stitcher more than thirty searches to find a line with suitable enjambment.

Poetics or science? I can see it as placing simple but craftily fashioned obstacles into natural flows of language — as garnered from Google using instruments of linguistic=scientific observation — and producing, arguably, an uncannily aesthetic turbulence.

*This is a work of the Natural Language Liberation Front (NLLF). These texts were collected with instruments made, at the point of immediate production, by John Cayley, but as a spin off from his major collaboration with Daniel C. Howe, The Readers Project, and fundamentally dependent on Howe’s extraordinary RiTa libraries for Processing.

Adair: Hi John —

It may reflect no more than my ignorance of the field of computer poetry, but I find interesting in the poems you’ve sent the types of constraints built in: specifying, for example, parts of speech that are to be brought into conjunction; requiring the programs to apply various natural language criteria; setting a limit on the amount of failed searches before a cut-off point is reached, producing thus both stanzas & entire poems. Such constraints throw limits at (to quote your first essay) the infinity of “flow [which] remains capable of generating a bewildering & uncharted variety of significant & affective dimensions,” with a degree of micro-management unfamiliar to me from, say, the most complex aleatoric methodologies of Cage, which often seem to be after conditions that will encourage maximal strangeness; thus in Etudes Boreales — thinking (me, not Cage) of Amy — he uses separate operations to determine, as cellist Frances-Marie Utti puts it, “exact pitch, duration, articulation, color & dynamic … for each sound,” making where any piece will go after the present note impossible to anticipate on a number of levels at once. Likewise the natural language constraints of “Zero Count Stitcher” preclude the radical kind of word-to-word disjunctions & intricate musicality found in, for example, Coolidge’s The Maintains (1974) (I don’t know what Coolidge’s method was here); & your use of Google Books notwithstanding, your methods, not least the linear word-counts, rule out any hint of flarfiness — tho’ there are surrealist (presurrealist?) glimpses aplenty: “he falls pilgrim / sailing to bloated / a choking pine / just below tracing / your hand rose-tinged” (“ZCS”) — Baudelaire’s Cythera in the screen of some electronic glow? — obviously signifier precedes signified here, meanings in search of flitting referents that adjacent lines may quasi-stabilize —

These poems offer me several focuses: the linear consistencies and cut-off points that give units; the generative system that adapts itself to the effectively infinite flow — what happens to imports of a line or stanza or poem when its beginning was in “thousands of specially constructed three-word phrases”? More emphatically than the other poems you send, “ZCS” undercuts any fantasy of uniqueness/individuality of line or subject position by its structure of repetitions/rearrangements, most powerfully in the first two stanzas given, where so full-throated a repetition seems to drain the lines of meaning; or perhaps more accurately, it’s hard the second time to work up the same degree of enthusiasm for what had the first time appeared as intriguingly evocative lines; so that if Joyce was right that there were more languages to begin with than were absolutely necessary, there were also never nearly as many as were needed. But then there’s a third reading, preferably some time later, when the lines can be productively recontemplated (something that with poems otherwise structured can usually be done on the second reading, no matter how soon after the first) —

The poems also offer the focus of vocabulary, of what kinds of words are being used, & that opens up more variances & nuances than I can indicate here. But it always intrigued me that in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” about to launch into The Cantos, Pound judged that “certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence & law …. These facts are hard to find. They are swift & easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs the electric circuit.” The epic would then be “a poem including history,” as opposed to “about history,” by coalescing around these “luminous details,” the nodal lightnings where history’s complexities got things done. Other sciences besides electrical engineering, & for their own ends — the need to get a handle on discontinuous processes (turbulence in aerodynamics) or heterogeneous mixtures (alloys) — had also been shifting the notion of ‘information’ away from referential models toward something like clutches of differential quantities, directly performative in the process in question. This makes it fairly easy to link information & the Second Law (“to entropy child,” “ZCS”). Cybernetics, coupling communications with control, got going in the 40s; Austin theorized “performative utterances” — thinking of Joan (ditto caveat) — in How to Do Things with Words (1962). Not that such utterances hadn’t, to nearly all intents & purposes, previously functioned — the point was that now they were discernible, definable, & thus evocable as they hadn’t been before. Negentropy.

But there’s also a parallel to this often fairly macho stuff in the resolutely ordinary, superficially unlearned vocabularies with which Stein did such extraordinary things. Multiple influences could be proposed here: domestic space, the vaunted democratic sociality back across the Atlantic & the place (Bob’s investigation) of genius within it, anti-Wagnerian tendencies, Cezanne obviously, a perceptible distribution of certain technologies … but hard to rule out extraordinary hypotheses about a novel autonomy of the impossibly small coming from quantum mechanics, or even the self-sufficiency of local fittedness coming from Darwin — which themselves fed into whatever provoked the assertion of Eric Mottram cited by James near the beginning of this thing, that “most concrete poetry abjures the grip of sentence as a main basis of design, and design is a term which art and science have in common.” Obviously such hypotheses of influence can’t interlock with any click, only radiate more or less grazing. But both Stein and (before her) concrete poetry introduced a baldness of the word, or the letter, unknown before, a baring of each mundane unit to tensile & active vulnerability, requiring for each a scrutiny that could turn to marveling (or not), given the odds against such prominence in a literary text. This seems to me a more compelling aesthetic reason for the abjuring of uppercase letters than the affectation hostile critics so often put it down to (tho’ “i” I do now think is an affectation). The words without preamble, yet also appearing in clutches of formal consistency both visual (the look of the page) & audial (the rough length of poems in a series, for instance) which we could count as waves or locales. Andrews, Inman, gender, frame. But with Coolidge’s caveat from “The Case of the Surrealist Bundling” in Odes of Roba: “Apollinaire’s belief held that snacks are a mystery. / How could countless certainties be settling right now?”

I should add I don’t want to give the impression of thinking that form is there to ward off or mask actual infinity, even if various aesthetics have had an eye to the problem of some variant of infinity for a century or more. I think form is there to make function. Perhaps someone could take odds with the intolerable generality of this.

Catanzano:

“There has to be a (back)ground against which the traces of these other dimensions can be remarked. I’m already going deeper than I wanted, and so I will desist from further amateur philosophy (philosophy=science? linguistic philosophy=science?) by asserting that the ground we need consists in those ‘operations of our subjectivities … typically … deemed to be private or internal.’”

I see this claim for private and internal subjectivities in relation to my borealis project …

“The trick of being alive is something about having an outside which can be witnessed, and an inside that can’t.”

Can the inside do this outside witnessing?

“I do seem to be claiming that science-as-technological-mediation engages with poetry at precisely the point where science-as-affectless-denial-of-an-inside is least capable of bearing witness to any potential blossomings of virtuality and aesthetics.

“(Self-)sufficient words generate extra-dimensionalities of language. Moreover, just as ‘mere’ convention establishes particular natural languages as uncontested objects of scientific study, there is an extra sufficiency of habitual literary practice that allows other dimensions of texts to be distinctly appreciable — to criticism, if not to science. Singularly, traditionally, these dimensions remain ‘beyond’ the words themselves, emergent as a function of humanistic interpretation. Such phenomena exist, virtually. New media may, arbitrarily, materialize virtual dimensions of poetic practice, and this is what we have seen taking place — selectively, arbitrarily — since programmable machines became accessible to writers. To take an obvious example: the screen-based temporal presentation of textual events materializes a virtual performativity of graphic writing practices, both remediating and recalling actual performances of orality, and restoring a restructured time-based dimension to language, one that is at least ostensibly or potentially more complex than the apparently resolved or resolvable linearity of print. In general, this restructuring, in language, of the human culture of time is, in my opinion, one of the few recent developments in aesthetic language practices that requires a fundamental rethinking of the object of literary criticism — of those that are enabled byprogrammable media, that is. More and more (poetic) writing will be, literally, materially, time-based, and it will be inappropriate if not impossible to address many literary objects/processes as established texts, or as texts in a ‘before,’ ‘after,’ or any other state.”

Another way to think of it, based on your idea that the text can’t be in any state, is that writing deforms time. But this may be an Adamitic approach to language.

“But even this vital, inalienable, if until recently ‘stunned,’ dimension of written language was always, I would claim, virtually present and available to all language practice, regardless of media. This is equally true of the familiar varieties of simultaneous relationship between linguistic items, such as those described as metaphoric. They are ever-present effervescent lexical and allusive tori, haloing the syntagmatic flow. Despite and apart from any technological ‘affordances,’ the flow remains capable of generating a bewildering and uncharted variety of significant and affective dimensions. This makes it difficult for any particular technology to gain an established status. For me, recently, one proof of this strange state of affairs has been revealed in the disregard or, perhaps, misdirected regard that writers have for typography as a productive dimension of writing. Typographic sensitivity is taken as evidence for attention to the graphic materiality of language (a problematic concept: is the materiality graphic or linguistic?); whereas I believe that the typographic is an established, but insufficiently acknowledged dimension of linguistic practice, a structured field in which syntagmatic flow has long been seen and felt to exist, and which allows it to generate and elaborate significant and affective relations precisely in a typographic dimension that is oblique to both time and syntactic extension. Further proof that this historically established practice is not sufficiently appreciated is demonstrated by the common practice of ditching established typographic principles as soon as other new technologies become available; I mean technologies that may be seen to serve the relational purposes typography once served, or that highlight other ‘newer’ or more fashionable textual relations. The situation may be improving, but think of the standard unschooled typographic engagement of animated, kinetic textuality — more concerned with concrete poetic figures (language-as-graphics miming animate, kinetic objects) than with poetics per se (assuming poetics represents thinking through aesthetic linguistic practice from a comprehensive and open perspective).”

I wonder if this notion of typography as materiality could be extended to any imagistic representation of language. When does the poem become a picture, and is it still a poem? I always say “yes.”

“Thus, a recent long-term collaboration, with Daniel C. Howe, still in its initial stages, The Readers Project, is, in some measure, a poetic exploration and visualization of the typographic dimension of selected linguistic practices. However, more importantly for the present discussion, other aspects of this project exemplify certain ways in which programmable media, accessing indexed language on the internet, enable different modes of engagement with poetic process. It’s conceivable to me that these generative modes can be characterized in terms of what we currently recognize as practices of science.” […]

“Is it the case that one of those things that the indexed internet allows us to do is to have a sense of an ‘all of language’ in the manner that we have a sense of the all of nature? Those instruments of science that have been developed during and since the enlightenment have only relatively recently given us a generative sense of ‘all of our (spherical) earth,’ orbiting a star, in a galaxy, in an expanding universe, (im)possibly one of innumerable multiverses. Now, although what is visible language — like visible matter — is only a tiny faction of the dark words that must surely be everywhere, nonetheless our perspective has been shifted radically by the existence of the Net and by the instruments at our near-free disposal which index and structure this universe.”

I have a poem called “Objects of the Visible Language.” One of my primary concerns is the difference between the invisible universe of dark matter and the visible language of utility. I might argue that in both cases there is no “all,” only innumerable.

“And does this now entail our being able to see language as more like nature than we had previously?”

In this the “all of nature view” you reference above?

“Perhaps even more at one with nature than we had considered? I mean this not in terms of any spurious human/natural dichotomy, but in terms of what the Chinese have called ziran, the ‘self-so,’ phenomena which simply are what they are, lacking any concern for the human or whatever-might-be-opposed-to-it, for the outside-inside subjective dialectics of any particular living species.”

Fascinating! Regarding this “self-so,” isn’t the self also a construct of nature, which might be called physical reality (in physics, anyway)?

“I find myself implicitly making great claims for what, in terms of actual poetic production are still only tiny gestures.”

Curious: isn’t the “great claim” also the poem to some extent?

“I’m appending a few texts made using very simple programs. There is an explicit intention here, inspired in part by Nick Montfort’s more OuLiPian ppg256 project, to keep the engineered artifice of the machine itself as compact and as simple as possible, allowing structures in language itself to be revealed by these instruments, like lenses that simply magnify the images passing through them; always assuming there is present a complementary perceptual system — an eye or a poetic sensibility — to further appreciate the resulting anamorphic retinal impressions.

“Or, if I could, I would make a programmatic instrument that was like the naturally articulated granite outcrop of a small lakeland island, where light, breeze-formed waves of language would ebb and flow in chaotically braided coils, through faults and channels in the long-worn rock.”

By writing this have you made such an instrument?

“Watching and listening to this moving water: Is this science? Or poetry? What is the knowledge or aesthetics that such processes enfold?”

My instinct to your question is that the redefinition of science and poetry is needed to perceive the water moving through such braided coils, otherwise we lose “sight” of the “lakeland” island, forgetting we are simultaneously on both “lake” and “land.”

“Like a Metaphor,” Gilbert Adair’s feature on poetry and science, comes together as a response to PoemTalk #22, on Louis Zukofsky’s Anew. Collecting a number of poems, critiques, and dialogues between eleven poets who share an interest in science — Rae Armantrout, Amy Catanzano, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack — this feature explores how scientific discourse might be incorporated by poets not simply as a source of metaphor but as an “independent discipline.”

More interviews

An interview between Christy Davids and Allison Cobb

Note: Allison Cobb is the author of four books, most recently After We All Died, which was published by Ahsahta in late 2016. Her poetry is invested in locating the self in the landscape of the world, and does so with an eye toward ecology and an ear toward music. Her work incorporates research, considers historical and scientific contexts, and regularly plays with the boundaries of poetry and essay.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague interviews Eric Sneathen and Lauren Levin

Note: On December 11, 2016, I talked with authors Eric Sneathen and Lauren Levin over Google Docs. Eric was in a café in the Bay; Lauren was also in the Bay, in bed with her daughter running in and out of the room; and I was sitting at my dining table in Philadelphia. Eric and Lauren are the two newest authors of the small press Krupskaya, which has published their books Snail Poems and The Braid (respectively). Both of these books were their debuts.

Note: On December 11, 2016, I talked with authors Eric Sneathen and Lauren Levin over Google Docs. Eric was in a café in the Bay; Lauren was also in the Bay, in bed with her daughter running in and out of the room; and I was sitting at my dining table in Philadelphia. Eric and Lauren are the two newest authors of the small press Krupskaya, which has published their books Snail Poems and The Braid (respectively). Both of these books were their debuts.